By Catherine Morin
Oracle has announced a new second-generation cloud region in Montreal, following the launch of its Toronto cloud region last year.
The opening is part of Oracle’s plan to operate 15 additional cloud regions by the end of the year, for a total of 36, the company revealed.
It also falls within Oracle’s “in-country dual region strategy,” which consists in offering a second region for disaster recovery in every country where the company launches cloud services.
“Giving access to two regions allows Canadian customers to deploy both production and disaster recovery capacity within their country to meet business continuity,” explained Vinay Kumar, vice-president of product management.
Unlike first-generation clouds, which are built to support startups, generation 2 infrastructure is specifically designed to help enterprises run demanding workloads securely.
“With Oracle’s second-generation cloud, customers benefit from consistent high performance, as well as the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to the cloud quickly,” Kumar indicated.
He considers that Oracle’s security-first approach and open architecture set it apart from other cloud vendors.
“We’ve built a hardened architecture from the ground up that focuses on a zero-trust design, limiting access to data and management only to those who are authorized,” he pointed out, adding that the company continuously enables new options to help customers run third-party workloads in the cloud.
Without disclosing a precise number, Oracle says it has “many customers across Canada,” including fashion retailer Global Dynamite, tech solutions provider CMiC and software company Frozen Mountain.
Oracle also has a significant public sector presence in the country, with several educational institutions and government agencies relying on its infrastructure.
The need to maintain operations during the COVID-19 pandemic has put cloud computing at center stage for many organizations. Oracle’s decision to scale up its offer may, therefore, come with perfect timing for Canadian enterprises.
In line with this move toward more cloud-based services, Amazon Web Services added a third availability zone to its Canadian cloud region last week.
